Edie has broken away again. In her room, on the phone, she might as well be on Mars. Only then, the family would have a phone line that could be used by someone besides Edie.

In the kitchen, innocently under the guise of preparing dinner together, her parents talk in voices that build in strength and volume.

“You let her get away with everything,” says the father. “Taking the phone into her room. What does she do in there? Do you know what she does in there? Next thing you know she’ll be mixing up drugs in there.”

“A growing girl needs her own space,” the mother says simply. “We need to give it to her in the ways that we can.”

“We gave her a whole room,” says the father. “What does she want, the rest of her friends to move in here too?”

“Don’t you remember how it was?” The mother reaches out a hand, encounters his warm wrist. “When you were young, when you needed…privacy?”

His face darkens. “I was a dangerous kid,” he says. “The more privacy I got up to, the less you’d want me to have. You think a telephone’s harmless, you think it can’t hurt anyone? You know nothing, Al. You got to trust me.”

“I got to trust you,” she echoes weakly.

The telephone receiver has one hundred thirty-two holes in the mouthpiece, and Edie methodically clinks the stake-sharpened nail of her pinky finger into the groove of each one in turn. It’s weird, over all the many hours she’s been on the telephone, full weeks of her life if you added it up, she’s never paid attention to how the actual thing looks before. It’s not white but the color of pearls, thick enough to nuzzle its plastic flesh into the nape of your neck, a curve that feels like it’s made for your hand but no, when you cradle it (cradle? is it a baby? do you treat it like one?) you’ll find your hand stretching its contour to adjust to the phone, not the other way around. Ever notice how we say you’re on the phone but the truth is, it’s on you? And you don’t want to get off.

Edie plays the field. She toggles off one line and onto another, jumping ship when the going gets tough, when the new line drops the hint of something to offer that the old one just can’t—a hint of gossip, maybe, someone who likes someone who likes someone, or a change of scenery, or just a change of rhythm—and she makes the leap.

Once upon a time she did this in person. They gathered in groups, live. Little enclaves all over the hallway, or out on the lawn. Each time she entered one she kept one eye drifting among the others, appraising the value of conversation, the secrets being spread. Was that really how they worked? She couldn’t remember. Were they sitting or standing, close enough to overhear or confidentially distant? She can’t remember. She is beginning to lose track of faces. But the voices, yes. The voices are clearer than ever.

She has figured out the cleanest way of dethroning the phone from its seat on the hallway table, looping the cord around the hinges of her bedroom door, rotating the cord sideways so it closes seamlessly.

The family is sealed off.

Her privacy is secure.

Real life can begin.

First is Toby. She always begins the night with Toby. She carefully prods for and artfully deflects news of the day, since she hasn’t heard from anyone else yet. Toby would understand. Not really, but maybe. Toby has her own phone line in her room. She sneaks calls between lessons, completing one worksheet in the big yellow textbook they all had mailed to them, then indulging in a whispered five-minute exchange with someone.

Edie dreams of such freedom. Occasionally she risks a call during the day, but such calls are even more prone to interference and premature termination, punctured by an “Edie! Are you all done your homework?” or “Please, Aunt Beltane is supposed to call and we need to keep the line free” or, worst of all, “We’re your family, why don’t you talk to us a little?” The real plague of this plague is its prolongedness, how no one’s treating it like an emergency anymore. It is the opposite of snow days. All the worst parts of isolation and none of the consolation prizes. They have so much free time it’s oppressive, assignments but no classes, schoolwork but no friends, being woken up early with no moment of freedom once you step into the world outside your parents’ purview.

The best time to begin, she’s found, is in the grey area between the end of the school day and dinner, the time when the parents are afraid to demand anything of them and want to bestow the reward of not being bothered.

Edie begins with Toby, of course. Toby and Edie are sworn allies. They would abandon conversation with anyone else to speak to each other, or at least that’s the way it used to be. Lately Toby is always on the phone with Marlon, a new guy to their circle who may or may not be becoming Toby’s boyfriend. Today, Toby ventures he is probably not.

But he likes you and you like him, Edie reminds her.

Sure. But, like, there’s nothing official. I mean, obviously we haven’t kissed.

You could kiss goodbye.

This suggestion is so ludicrous that they both spit out laughs. Self-aware, Edie wipes the receiver, then remembers she’s the only one who uses the phone.

If only I could get him to stick his lips through the telephone, muses Toby, moaning her syllables a little too emphatically. Or maybe something else.

Like his tongue? supplies Edie.

But she knows she’s gone too far, both too explicit and not explicit enough, a scraping static sound like gagging on a finger. She is horrified at the reaction, but more horrified she would open herself up to it.

When are you going to talk to Marlon?

Maybe right after I’m off with you?

No, really?

We haven’t planned. But he said to call him as soon as I can.

As soon as you can.

Obviously, you’re my first priority, Edie.

Are you going to tell him you spoke to me? Will you tell him what we talked about?

There is a flirtatious dare in Edie’s words, and Toby doesn’t miss it. For a moment it seems as thought they’re on the same page— Of course I’ll tell him, Toby says, and Edie says Make sure you tell him everything, and when Toby shoots back the noncommittal, Which part?—Edie feels doomed.

Then there is a click on the line—Edie? Edie, are you on? Mommy says it’s time to have your bath and get ready for dinner—and she drops from doomed to damned. Dad, she says, gritted teeth pressed right up against the jail bars of the phone receiver, I’ll be down in a minute.

Don’t worry about it, giggles Toby, the glee possibly spurting through her lips. I’ll get back to you. I’ll make sure to report absolutely everything.

Edie isn’t worried. Toby knows your worth is gauged on the value of your friends, and any black mark against Edie would result in a decrease of both their social capital. Still, she has to find some way to rein in that dad. Anyone else on the other line, and that could spell greater trouble than she’s prepared to deal with.

Edie comes to dinner as beseeched, a stark, vapid, torturously long affair of which food is ostensibly the smallest part. Over the course of the extended monotonous days of unbroken unceasing house, she eats what and how she wishes, materializing in the kitchen when she desires a snack, excavating through the cookie jar or digging for pretzels in the pantry over the mother’s strained offers to fix a sandwich and sometimes strained silence, both disapproving and obedient, aware of Edie’s determination to do what she wishes and the mother’s own inability to stop her.

Edie comes to dinner, avoiding eye contact and conversation and, largely, food. There is a steaming brown meat, a pile of something white and gloopy to accompany it on the side, a boat of muddling gravy, various green adornments to serve as tinsel. The family grazes on the meat, ignores the rest, until the supply dwindles and they are forced to turn to nutrients. Edie feels a hopeless inevitability, watching them all. The parents are all they will ever be, their daily routines and activities and life goals. Chip, too, once they’ve beaten the naivete and curiosity out of him, will find purchase in this life, the simple repetition of a factory job, he’ll be fine being ordinary. She needs something greater, the unknown, the rich decadent chaos of talking to everyone at all times.

Edie returns upstairs to a warm room and the ringing of a phone. Unsure whether this is the first ring or the tenth, she waits to answer, but not too long, just enough to seem otherwise occupied. Nonetheless she feels the undeniable rush of adrenaline as she raises the receiver, exiting the dinnertime life.

Edie. The way he says her name, getting down to business. She appreciates that.

Hey Raul, what did you do today?

What? he says, thrown by her question. Why?

Well, I usually see you for six or seven hours a day, basically nonstop. I haven’t seen you at all for nearly a month. Not to be weird, but isn’t that weird? Tell me about the little things. Take me inside your life.

She is talking down to him like an adult, a teacher or a parent. They both laugh.

Well I got up, went down for breakfast, had some dry cereal—

Dry cereal?

Yeah, my mom forgot to buy milk. We had one carton left, and when it ran out, that’s it. We’re dry.

Life is hard.

Life, he says, slowly and gallantly, is easy. I sleep late, my dopey sister fills out my homework packages, I don’t have to go anywhere I don’t want to. What happened to Marlon, that’s hard.

She simultaneously receives a wave of sympathy, a shudder of sadness, and a pinch of suspicion.

What happened to Marlon?

You know Marlon. He lives near East Lake, in our bio class, always sits in the back?

Yes, I’m aware of his existence.

Warning sign. Edie has to tread lightly. She is in delicate, uncharted territory. There’s never been a thing between Raul and Toby, not an actual one, anyway, but insofar as she understands the equation, there have been several untested variables. What this means is, she can’t admit to Raul to know anything about Toby’s interests, nor any knowledge of Marlon. She has to play it dumb from all angles.

His mom just died.

Oh no.

I know. Not quite a month ago. Like, less than a week before we all got locked up.

She allows this news a generous measure of silence. Shocking is the kind way to put it.

Do they think it was…?

I mean, it was before anybody knew about it.

Before we knew about it.

Has Marlon said anything?

He’s the only one who hasn’t.

Poor guy. Everyone’s probably talking about him behind his back.

At least with the world the way it is, there’s no way he can hear it.

So how did you find out? she begins to ask, but she’s getting another call, and it’s Toby, and she needs to investigate this newfound lead.

Toby gives the rundown on the Marlon call.

We spent the entire time telling each other what we’d be doing with each other if we weren’t locked in our stupid houses.

Edie is scandalized and intrigued.

Like, describing in detail how you’d kiss?

She says things like this because she can.

Edie! No. Like, the last movies that were out that he’d want to see. The places around town he’d take me. That sort of thing.

Well, where?

Where what?

Where’d he take you?

Oh! She is struck, momentarily thrown off track, or perhaps caught in the swell of a private reverie: a moment and senses so strong she’s unable to pull free of it. Then she recovers: The movie plex. The skate park. Aldo’s Pizza. Twilight Falls.

Hmm, I wonder if you could get to Twilight Falls.

Aren’t you forgetting we’re all under house arrest?

No, I mean—we’re just not allowed to be near anyone else, right? That’s the unsafe part. So what if you could manage it so you’re not near anyone else? His dad drives him to the hiking path and your dad drives you. Inside the car must be safe; it’s just like being inside. So each of you gets out right at the start of the trail. From the parking lot, it’s only like twenty steps, right? You go in off the side path, through the gooseberry bramble—no one’s there so they’re not gonna hold you guilty or even find you out. You’d be totally free of catching anything from anyone. You can meet each other right when he pulls you up from the gooseberries, or right where the lake comes out from the trees, or you can be waiting for each other right under the waterfall, in the cave in the back where the spray hits your face and your clothes as you wait, and when he finds you, you’re sparkling.

Edie catches herself, breathless. Then thinks of Marlon, and his mom, and how his mom died, and whether that means Marlon might die, too.

Or, she adds, maybe you could just see each other from opposite sides of the Falls. Maybe you could wave to each other.

Edie, echoes Toby, sounding elated if not outright hypnotized. This is wonderful.

Well, says Edie quickly, embarrassed. It’s just an idea.

She makes her excuse and gets off quick. And then, just to clear her palette, like ice cream after a spicy steak, she calls Merry, who will erupt without a doubt into complaints about their shared state of imprison ment—her dad says it’s a government sham; her dad is a plumber and was one day plumbing the pipes of a toilet belonging to the Chair of the Chamber of Commerce, and you won’t believe what he heard.

Yes, Edie will believe it. Conspiracy theories are her favorite gossip. Anything to get her off thinking about Toby and her poisoned boyfriend and his poisoned dead mother.

Downstairs, the parents hear the click, the father darts for the phone, “I’m gonna call the grocer,” he says. “While I still can. Grocer oughta be able to bring over a few boxes of something, that’s what we pay him for, you know? Guys’ gotta make a living.”

“He might not be,” says the mother in something between a murmur and a whisper.

“Whaddya mean?”

“He’s got to watch that he doesn’t catch it too, doesn’t he? So if he’s still running his business, how do you figure he’s going to keep himself safe?” The way she said safe was pronounced tentative, unsafe.

“There’s all kinds of safe. Man’s gotta eat. Man’s gotta feed a family.” He pronounced family the same way.

“Have you heard anything from work?”

“I’m not on the board of directors, they ain’t looping me in every time someone’s got a toothache—”

“You haven’t gotten a check in the mail in three weeks.”

She places it there, this fact, into the open, and it sits between them and stares and does nothing and it does too much. She doesn’t want to offend him. But just this, just bringing the fact into existence by its mention, is a slap in the face.

He roars out of his seat. He stands before her, both larger than life and, against the dimensions of the room, pathetically small. He is hot, combusting with anger, and she half fears he’s going to hit her and half that he’ll explode.

“So what? You want to leave and get a job?” He waits for an answer. “You want to leave?”

And he really would do it too, she thinks. He really would let her leave. He would manage the house, bathe and launder the children, try to decipher the cards of her recipe box, or just go hunting for carrion each night. He was a doer, no thinking here in any greater scope than what he could see or smell or throw a fist at, and it’s one of the reasons she once found herself drawn to him: he was simple, refreshingly straightforward, what you see is what you get.

But then she grew to feel his hand in everything she did, the firmly guiding control of his direction. In some things he was expertly competent; in others—feeding himself—he was in every way helpless; he exerted his power in both. His voice was an uninterruptible soundtrack to her cooking, her clothing, her parenting, always what she was doing wrong, always how to do it right. If he ran the grocery. If he ran the school. If he ran this house.

She smiles. It is a good smile, she knows: one of her virtues, both welcoming and sad. She reaches for his hand like a light switch.

“I don’t want you to leave,” she says. “Not ever.”

He looks doubtful, or maybe confused.

“I know you provide for us, and I know how special you are,” she tells him. “I just feel so mad at that plant. For not recognizing how special you are.”

He looks like he’s about to make a thing of it, launch into more of his wisdom—don’t disparage my power plant, perhaps—but instead he completes one of his acts of transference, eyes rolling back to the pantry, to the phone. He lifts the receiver and listens, then replaces it fast. “She’s still on,” he says. “What is she doing? What does she have to talk about?” Only too eager to fall back into agreement, the mother drops her eyes. “She spends so much time with these friends,” she says. “She doesn’t need to. She has everything she needs right here at home.”

“She has everything she needs,” grumbles the father, agreeing.

Before she goes to bed, Edie speaks with Jamie (heard we might be stuck in our homes till Christmas), Gretchen (heard Tillie was coming down with something), Tillie (completely fine), Raul (asks about Toby no less than four times), and, of course, Toby. They don’t have much left to still say, but as she brushes her teeth and does her hair for bed, she is reassured to share that comforting mossy silence. When Toby at last said, Well, I’m fallingasleep, good night, it was such a shock to Edie that Toby’s voice still sounded that way, that Toby still existed at all, that she too was roused from half-sleep and, bidding her goodbye, found herself so surprised by how many things she still found unexpected that she lay hours awake, trembling with the enormity of the world.

The next day, school packages are on the doorstep when they wake. Chip is merciful and slides hers through her bedroom door so the parents don’t knock and wonder why she isn’t doing it.

She rises, restrings the phone into her room. Tries to make a call but it’s occupied, her father talking to his work. She dons her bathrobe, drifts into the kitchen, and fixes herself coffee. Chip is at the dinner table, already wading into his schoolwork. The mother sits, feeding the baby beneath a shroud—the only time she seems to be sitting; the only relaxation she gets. Edie scurries away before she can think about that too much. She tries the phone again. Success. Its door stretches wide open for her.

Toby is up. More than that, it sounds like she’s been up for hours. It sounds like she could use another round of sleep. She trembles as she talks.

Marlon and I talked. So. Much. Last. Night, she says. So many things are happening. I feel close to him now, she says. Before it was just like we were, you know, interested in each other, maybe? But now I feel like it’s real. Like, we really like each other.

Toby, that’s great. So why do you sound so miserable?

It’s his mom, she says. Remember last month, when someone’s mom died so suddenly?

That was Marlon.

And it’s so good, and everything feels so real, but it’s like, how real can it be? How can I even be allowed to be happy? It just doesn’t feel acceptable.

Maybe you should accept it, Toby. We get so little to be happy about these days, you got to hold onto what you have.

And maybe she should say more, but there’s the telltale click on Edie’s end, the father picking up and starting to dial. She can tell it’s him just from the sound of the phone being lifted up.

“Edie, really? Already?”

Talk to you soon, Edie says, and hangs up. She was not saying that to her father.

The days are like torture. Edie once complained to her history teacher that class was like torture, the result of which was, she was required to write a five-page paper on modern torture methods. What she discovered was, it wasn’t about the pain so much as the idea of pain, the prolonged quality of it as it was being given, and the suggestion that its withdrawal might never come. The way you get out of bed and stand straight up, always expecting you’ll always be able to do so, until they stick frog poison in your legs or stuff you in a box, and you can never stand up again.

The phone gets taken away. Only one time, only for an hour, but it is the longest hour of the plague, and by far the most torturous.

The mother is the one who delivers the news, but Edie is sure it’s the father’s words. It’s not that we don’t want you to talk to your friends, she says. It’s just, we don’t want that to be the only thing you do.

She doesn’t understand, the phone isn’t the only thing Edie does. It’s all the things she does. She mentions this to Toby, when she is finally permitted to rejoin the phone once again. In return, Toby emits a wistful sigh and says, it’s kind of the way things are when you like a guy, and you know he likes you, but nothing’s happend yet.

It’s all potential, says Edie. You can go any way you want to, so in that moment you’re going in every direction at once.

She hears Toby breathing over the scratchy digital line. She is pretty sure she can hear Toby’s pulse race.

There’s something I have to tell you. I mean, I don’t have to tell you, but Marlon and I, we’re no just potential.

Something happened? Edie swirls the question full of joy. That’s awesome! She forgets, for the moment, the geographic and choreographic impossibility of this.

Dark silence.

Dark static.

Yes.

Dark static.

Dark silence.

She struggles, tries to dwell in the selfless feeling of happiness for her friend. In this cold world empty of people, she has found a person! This is good! Isn’t it?

It was the end of the day, Toby says. Literally the day before everything happened. We were all sitting out on the lawn. It was the day you’d found a saxophone and everyone was trying to play it. He’d come out to join us. He was with us, with everyone. We weren’t together, not really. We’d accidentally move in opposite directions and wind up crashing into each other. His knee would bump mine and stay there. Edie, it felt so good to share a secret with someone, to share that touch.

Mm, I know. Edie eases into the nest of pillows on her bed, allowing herself to spread her body across this soft comfort.

And when we all were leaving, he walked me to the bus stop. He waited in the shelter with me. It was just the two of us. It was so nice, the bus took forever to come. And then—she chokes on the space between words, the next can barely leave her mouth—he kissed me.

By the time she manages to extract the sentence her voice is low, hoarse, dark. She is devoid of surprise and devoid of joy. Like she’s been sucked dry, like there’s nothing left. A month ago those words would have meant something so entirely different.

Oh!—oh, says Edie. But that’s okay. But that’s beautiful. Are you okay? Are you worried?

Should I be?

It’s been a month.

Should I worry? We don’t know anything. Should I worry about him? Should I worry about me?

Did you—were your—was it open-mouthed?

It was a kiss, she says, mournful and majestic and devastated and funereal and hysterical and a dull monotone so colorless it’s as if she is already dead. A real kiss. Not a kid kiss, Edie. What do you think? There were parts of us, she adds significantly, in each other’s bodies.

What does Edie think? Lips, tongues, teeth. She is repulsed and stirred, and would never admit to Toby to feeling either one.

She makes a sound like a cartoon frog being flattened by a cartoon boot.

Toby erupts in peals of laughter—not a flood, but a trickle. Still, she’ll take it.

You always know the right thing to say, says Toby. Edie’s about to say, she didn’t say anything, but Toby interrupts her by saying, if anything happens, you’ll be the one to talk about me at my funeral, won’t you, and Edie has no choice but to dumbly agree. “She’s on the phone again,” says the father.

“She spends more time on the phone than off it,” says the mother.

“She’s running up the bill is what she’s doing.”

“She’s losing touch with the world.”

“We got to do something about it.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Find out what she’s up to.”

The mother has never spent so much time with her friends as Edie does with hers—at Edie’s age, the mother was helping out at home and doing the books for the family business, her father absent, her rewards scant. She learned to find interest in whatever was her responsibility at the time, to accept joy in whatever form it was granted to her. She doesn’t hate Edie for being so stingy with her own joy. She doesn’t.

It’s 3:00ish. Edie skipped lunch because she had breakfast at eleven, but somehow she has become hungry again. Leftovers? Cereal. She unfolds the box and waterfalls it into her bowl. Half full, the well runs dry. She goes to the small forgotten white door to the cellar and begins to descend. Six steps down, the lights flicker off, then on, then zap off again.

“Hello?” says the darkness to Edie.

“Chip?” says Edie back.

“You finished the toothpaste,” the dark accuses her. “Then the lights went out. I thought I’d be able to feel around to find a new tube. I can’t.”

She sighs.

“Chip, why are you brushing your teeth in the middle of the afternoon?”

“It’s after every meal. We just had lunch—”

“You just had lunch.”

“Are you foraging for more cereal?”

She gives herself and the dark a private smile. Talking to Chip like this, robbed of their physicality, she feels such a tender, disembodied closeness toward him as she has never felt. He sounds so small, so compact and cute like a frizzy-headed doll. She would never be ashamed of him, she would carry him around in her pocket, smuggle him to school and doctors’ offices. She wants to trust him completely, she loves him so. Is this what their shared womb was like?

“Chip?” she says, and her voice sounds strange in her own ears. Like she is still a small girl, or maybe like she is another girl entirely.

She tries to see him, to pierce the dark with the night vision that all children have that we lose once we get older. In response, she hears the rattle of a cereal box.

“Found it for you,” he says.

She does her homework packet. The math is easy. All she has to do is look at the questions, see what they’re asking, give them the answer. She enjoys certainties. She would appreciate a world that was all numbers, that was all math.

Once it’s out of the way, she talks. She talks to Gretchen, who has heard that Toby has a boyfriend and is outraged she didn’t find out from Toby herself. (Implicit in the accusation is that Edie, who knows all of Toby’s secrets possibly better than Toby does, didn’t give her advance warning.) Edie begins a campaign of assurance, I didn’t know it either how can you be sure it’s true, but clicks over because it’s Tillie, who just discovered that the boy she likes—his name’s Marlon, do you know him, he sits in back of us in History, he has a dead mom, super recent, he looks so sad, he’s so tortured—is going out with someone, and how could he date anyone, doesn’t he need the time and space to mourn his mother, she can’t imagine what that girl must be doing to Marlon’s poor brain.

She talks to Raul, who is uncharacteristically muddled and distracted and annoyed. He tells her nothing at all is wrong. He tells her he doesn’t miss school that much, that he isn’t looking forward to going back, that even if they get the opportunity maybe he won’t take it.

Are you being serious?

We conquered the school already, Edie, he says. We’re at the top of the food chain. Where do you go from here? To the big city? To Broadway? To hitchhiking all the way to Europe?

Um, Raul, you got a slight problem with that plan—

I have no problems, he crows. A problem’s only a problem if it gives you problems. I have no problem with anyone. Let Toby live her winsome romantic life.

Oh, so that’s what it’s about.

What? Suddenly Raul sounds more clear than he’s been all night. Did she think that or say it aloud? Is any of this happening outside her head, or inside her ears?

The line clicks. It is Toby.

Hold on, Raul, shes ays before abandoning him, not sure what she’s telling him to hold onto, or how long, or how hard, or why. I have to take this, she says.

She comes to Toby in silence. No how are you, no what’s going on, no exchange of news or rumors or stories. Just the silence of Edie picking up, and the silence of Toby hanging on.

But it’s an easy silence that she offers, a comfortable one. It’s a silence that Edie provides for her, and one that Toby stretches out in, like a whole nest of pillows, filling up the space and allowing herself to let her guard down, and allowing herself to feel safe. And only once she’s truly nested, slowed her mind down and allowed it to absorb and adjust to the information it has encountered, Toby relates it to Edie.

He’s sick.

If ever there was a follow up question for Edie to ask, the tired scratchiness in her voice renders it redundant. If he is sick, so is she.

And if she is sick…

“Edie!”

The voice is a scream of molten thunder. It strikes the house and melts it. She hears it on the phone, in her room, from downstairs, filling up the whole world.

Edie? says Toby. Are you okay?

Call you back, says Edie, though it’s probably too late for her to hear.

The father is a kind of mad Edie rarely sees. He crashes in her room and rips off the door just long enough to tell her she’s never coming out. And to grab the phone. She can see he’s revolted to touch it—not scared but disgusted—but he grabs it anyway. Her door is broken but he slams it and leaves its corpse propped against the doorframe.

Downstairs he calls the authorities. She listens through the floor but she can only hear his side of the conversation.

She does not have dinner. She cannot fall asleep, she’s slept too much already. No one comes to visit her.

In the night the house is empty. The father snores; the baby sucks her omnipotent pacifier. Thin slats of moonlight cast new paths across the upstairs hall.

She sneaks the phone into the linen closet. She doesn’t dare take it to her room. She holds her breath as she dials, nose right up against the freshly fluffed sheets, smelling full breaths of detergent. She calls Toby, of course, but there is no response and she doesn’t dare let it ring long. Then she calls Raul. Raul has his own line.

What happened to you? he laughs. I thought for sure you were a goner. Thought I’d never see you again either.

She is tempted to laugh, but something makes her stop.

Either? What do you mean, either?

You talked to Toby tonight? Or, should I say, tried to?

A coldness starts in her stomach and grows upward. What do you mean?

Toby, she’s gone. Marlon, too. Both of them, they got taken away.

Taken? Where? By who?

I don’t know. I asked their parents on the phone, they didn’t say.

So how do you know anything at all?

Someone saw Toby leaving her house. She was in a big plastic bubble, with a bunch of guys in white suits. You know that kid Vadim?

You talk to Vadim?

I mean, not all the time. Sometimes.

Vadim is a part of the phone calls? Who calls him? This unsettles her. A voice in the dark that she’s never encountered, not in all her hopping from call to call to call. She thought she knew every inch of this world. She thought it was her world.

Then something else occurs.

Toby and Marlon?

Toby and Marlon. Both of them, the same day.

She broods on this. She broods on it late into the night, even later, till the sky goes from black to gray to a pale stricken blue. She falls asleep to the lullaby of the morning and is woken up by a knock at the door.

“Come in,” she grogs, “just prop the door on something behind you—”

It is promptly smashed into splinters by a murder of men in white trashbag suits with goldfish-bowlshaped masks.

They have already surrounded her. From nowhere emerges a set of thin metal poles—like tent poles, interlocking to form longer bending poles—and a translucent tarp that they yank over Edie’s head and body and assemble with astonishing speed and precision into what amounts to a big plastic bubble.

Edie claws at it. Her nails are freshly sharp but the tarp is surprisingly resilient. She screams as loud as she can. The plastic holds that in, too. The trashmen are surprisingly unbothered. She settles for slapping them and clawing at their eyes.

One launches, through no opening she can see, a long skinny stick down her throat. A beam of blinding yellow penetrates her eyes.

“Temperature normal.”

“No heightened pulse.”

“Yeah, I’m not getting any signs of germs on the fingertip swabs.”

Suddenly, Edie’s room seems a lot emptier than it was ten seconds ago.

She is set back on her bed; the bubble is being deflated and peeled away from her. There’s almost no one left, just Edie, a bubble man unwrapping a pressure gauge from her forearm, and, in the corner, a dazed-looking and uncomfortable version of Edie’s mother, wringing her arms tighter and tighter around her waist.

Edie’s arm shoots out and grabs the man just as he’s about to leave.

“Who are you?”

The voice comes filtered through the helmet and whatever other breathing apparatus he might have underneath. To Edie’s surprise, the voice is a woman’s. “Just a cleaner,” she says. “Came to see if anything needed cleaning.”

“And I—I’m okay? I’m not sick?”

“Healthy as a horse,” she confirms, making for the door.

“Wait!” cries Edie. The woman waits,though in the corner the mother reacts as if Edie’s cosigning her own death sentence. “What happens to the people—the ones who aren’t not sick?” she says. “Where do you take them?”

The woman wriggles her arm out of Edie’s grasp. The suits are so slippery it’s like they’re made of water. She can’t see anything through that helmet, but she gets a deep sense of a gaze piercing her.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “You’re not going anywhere near there.” Then she is gone.

Edie shrinks into her room, feeling suddenly very small.

“I’m sorry,” says the mother, lips tight, speaking more to the ground than Edie, and more to herself than the ground. “He didn’t know what would happen. He only wanted to keep you safe.”

Gently, Edie guides the mother out of her room, then returns to her bed. She wishes she could close the door, but the damn cleaners didn’t even fix that. They didn’t fix anything.

She spends the rest of the day in the remnants of her bedroom. At some point Chip comes to the shards of her door and glances in as if to say something, but she doesn’t look at him and he goes away.

She goes to sleep early, and wakes early, feeling like a senior citizen, exquisitely removed from the cares and concerns of those around her. The morning house is empty, save the self-congratulatory coos of the baby in her sleep.

She takes approving note of the trail of destruction emanating down the hall. Serves them right. The house is dark and barren, seemingly uninhabited. No one to call; no one’s up yet of course, but she doesn’t really feel like talking to any of her friends, anyway. She doesn’t want time alone with her thoughts either. She isn’t sure what she wants.

She finds herself drawn to the front door, that momentary glance and gasp of outside. She is, rarely, game for homework, almost eager for the right-or-wrong duality of math.

To her surprise, the day’s school packages have not yet arrived.

Instead, sitting on the doormat is a cardboard carton of not insignificant size. Its lid is folded in on itself. She squeezes it the tiniest bit. It yields, revealing the barest glimpse of its treasures.

Cereal boxes. Box after box of cereal.

And bags. A loaf of white bread, meats, a perfectly spherical head of pale-green lettuce, a bottle of milk. One way or another, the groceries have come.

Out there, someone, somewhere, sent them.

She drags the carton inside. She slides out one of the cereal boxes, clutches it to her chest. She thinks of the cereal being collected into the family’s grocery order, the entire package jigsawed together piece by piece into the carton, the inescapable fact that elsewhere in this quiet world, someone had to have packed them, someone put them in a car and someone else pumped the gas for that car and someone lifted it out from the car, placed it onto the welcome mat, just steps away from where she now stood. And just this idea—this notion that there are other people in her world, that there continue to be other people in her world—is enough to remind her that there are things happening beyond this house, that are greater than this house.